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Posts tagged 'Brooklyn Academy of Music'

Ted Hearne is not a composer to shy away from the real world. From his now-canonical Katrina Ballads, which sets texts related to the 2006 Hurricane of the same name, to his modern-day oratorio project The Source, which sets texts surrounding Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks, Hearne's music draws from the complexities of politics and recreates similar tensions and complexities within his music.

Hearne's 30-minute work for string orchestra, Law of Mosaics, is no exception to this rule. Hearne borrows the title from a passage in David Shields' Reality Hunger: "The law of mosaics: how to deal with parts in the absence of wholes." Commissioned in 2013 by A Far Cry, and released on CD alongside Andrew Norman'sThe Companion Guide to Rome in 2014, Law of Mosaics can be read as an essay in five parts. Picking up on Shield's metaphor of weaving a fabric between digital and analog media and culture, Hearne crafts a loosely-knit pattern of musical references and inspirations; if these form the weft of his weaving, then his own compositional voice constitutes its warp. In the end, the "patterns" woven together by Hearne resemble less a tightly-knit pastiche than performative absence of seamlessness, a reminder of the gaps and voids that constitute our everyday lives.

Ted Hearne's The Source, an immanently engrossing work based on the story of U.S. Army Private Chelsea Manning, will be released by New Amsterdam Records in late October of this year. The work, a "modern-day oratorio", sets texts made available via WikiLeaks to Hearne's charactaristically powerful musical language. Hearne emphasizes that the work "never asks the audience to pretend the musicians are fictional characters," and also "approaches its subject matter through discrete movements with tangentially related texts, rather than through traditional narrative storytelling"—two features of oratorios stretching back to the 18th century.

Time for another installment of New Music Mondays, that joyous day of the week when we make even more new works available through PSNY! Since our launch in November 2011, we've made over two hundred and fifty works available as digital downloads, and this week we add some more to our roster: two arias from Douglas J. Cuomo's opera Doubt, and the full score to Phil Kline's Out Cold, for voice and ensemble.

"The Boy's Nature" and "The Doubt Sermon", for mezzo-soprano and baritone, respectively, are two celebrated arias from Cuomo's 2013 opera, Doubt, which was commissioned and premiered by the Minnesota Opera with a libretto by John Patrick Shanley, after his Pulitzer Prize-winning play. The play was also adapted into a film in 2008.

Phil Kline's Out Coldis a 45-minute song cycle for voice and ensemble, which the composer calls "a cycle of torch songs, written under the influence of Schubert, Sinatra, and Nelson Riddle." Commissioned by American Opera Projects, this cycle premiered at BAM in 2012.